ORMOND BEACH, Fla. — Two Trump-backed Republicans won special congressional elections in Florida on Tuesday, according to The Associated Press, shoring up their party’s slim majority in the House at a crucial moment for President Donald Trump’s domestic agenda.
Jimmy Patronis, the state’s chief financial officer, won the race to replace Matt Gaetz in the 1st Congressional District, on the western end of the Panhandle. With most of the vote counted late Tuesday, Patronis had won 57%.
And state Sen. Randy Fine captured the 6th District seat that had been held by Michael Waltz, now Trump’s national security adviser. That district is rooted in Daytona Beach and parts of the northeast coast. Fine had 56.7% of the vote as of 9 p.m.
Both seats had been expected to remain in Republican hands, though some private polls showed Fine facing a close contest against Josh Weil, his Democratic opponent. Weil and Gay Valimont, the Democrat who ran against Patronis, each raised millions of dollars for their campaigns despite Democrats’ struggles in Florida.
Gaetz resigned from his House seat last year after Trump nominated him to be attorney general. He later withdrew from consideration for that post, amid an ethics investigation into allegations of sexual misconduct and drug use.
Both Patronis and Fine cleared their respective primary fields easily after securing Trump’s endorsement. Trump won both districts by double-digit margins in November.
Even so, as the special election Tuesday drew near, some Republicans voiced concern about Fine’s race. Steve Bannon, a top ally of Trump, warned on his show “War Room” that “we have a candidate that I don’t think is winning.”
Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican who represented the 6th District before running for statewide office, predicted that “it’s going to be a way underperformance” for his party, compared with previous elections.
Yet the race was called by The Associated Press just half an hour after the polls closed, as Republican elected officials and supporters of Fine were still ordering from a food truck at The 2A Ranch in Ormond Beach, Florida, where his campaign was hosting a watch party.
They celebrated the results inside a barn decorated with hundreds of pieces of Trump memorabilia, including flags, dozens of paintings of Trump and life-size mannequins.
“Mr. President, this win is yours far more than it is mine,” Fine declared.
Fine’s margin — about 14 points with nearly all of the votes counted as of 9 p.m. — was less than half of Waltz’s in November. Weil, in a statement after the results, called it “an incredible gain” for Democrats and “a warning sign” to Trump and his allies that voters would not support cuts to health care programs and Social Security, among others.
The Democratic National Committee pointed to Patronis’ similar margin in the Panhandle district, one of the most conservative in the state, as evidence that “the momentum is on our side.”
Ken Martin, chair of the DNC, said of Patronis’ Democratic opponent: “Her massive overperformance” in a district that Trump won by 37 percentage points last fall “is the best performance for Democrats in the district this century and spells trouble for Republicans everywhere.”
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